John Malmo

Nothing is more important in any business than its brand. And branding is very serious business. But what’s even harder than branding, is RE-branding.

Building a brand from scratch is very hard. Not for quitters. But at least you’re trying to reach open minds. As in, Now there’s a place to buy tacos, and it’s called Taco Bell. But if you add hamburgers and re-brand as, say, Taco & Burger Bell, people probably will never quit saying Taco Bell.

There are few devices better than an icon, or mascot, to help build personality and awareness for a brand. And creating a successful icon is not a terribly difficult process. But Burger King managed to screw it up.

As for personal tastes, I have always thought a Burger King hamburger was the best-tasting among fast-foot burgers. But the weird-looking, and weirder-acting, speechless, and spooky king that’s driven Burger King advertising for years is a dud.

Thankfully, new Burger King owners think so, too, because he’s being dethroned.

True marketing is a process of maximizing a company’s assets. It begins with identifying the company’s assets, and that’s not always as obvious as you might think.

The genius chief marketing officer at Delta Airlines was the first to identify Delta’s customers as an asset two years ago. The result included new sales opportunities that have accounted for over $1.5 billion in new revenue.

You can go through a similar marketing process in your own behalf, and you begin the very same way.

In a recent conversation with a group of instructors at a vocational college, one of them said, “Finding these young fellows a job after they graduate isn’t the problem. The problem is that many don’t understand what they have to do to keep their jobs.”

They just can’t get it in their heads that they have to come to work every day. That they can’t just decide to skip a day or two. They can’t realize the importance of being on the job at eight, not eight-forty-five. That they have to have on a clean shirt. They have to have their tools.

I guess I can say now that I’ve seen it all. It was a big social step when New York City started giving away millions of condoms every year. But a recent story in the New York Times took things up another notch.

A booklet came recently entitled Comcast XFinity Customer Privacy Notice. It is forty-eight pages. That’s a lot of overkill about privacy, I thought. So I opened it. Twenty-two pages about privacy in English. Then twenty-six more pages of the same message in Spanish.